In 1946, skiing on Mons Huygens would have been even more surprising than this woman’s face suggests. But scientists’ eyes were surely wider when ice was detected around the moon’s polar regions several decades later. But at the close of World War 2, we had an immediate problem: to think of something to do with all our rockets. And attaching them to snow skis is a wonderful idea. We also had a reduced demand for aircraft and it was in this period that the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation turned its attention to space exploration and developed the Grumman Moon Suit.

But Grumman wasn’t alone when its thinking turned to space. The hundred-something Science Fiction book covers in this flickr set confirm the popularity of these titles well before we ever walked on the surface of the Moon. And although we never drove Hispano-Suiza “Xenia” Coupes lookalikes around on the moon, the rovers we used to explore the lunar surface are still there collecting space dust. I imagine that before being scanned many of the science fiction books suffered the same fate on book shelves far away from the worlds they imagined.